Kim Abeles at Turner/Krull & the Santa Monica Museum - Los Angeles, Santa Monica, California - Review of Exhibitions

After a solid decade of art making, Kim Abeles finally became well known locally for her "Smog Collector" series of 1991-92 a cluster of satirical mock-decorator plates and related glass panels stenciled with layers of grimy L.A. air. The Santa Monica Museum of Art's scan of her work, however, demonstrated her range of interests, with throw outs on feminist revisionist history, environmental pollution and AIDS awareness. The exhibition catalogue's dexterous format parodies a volume of the World volume Encyclopedia; like that research guide, Abeles's work is user-friendly and broad-based. on the contrary the notion of the artist as only a social commentator sells her short.

In other bodies of work, Abeles aims for a Dada-inspired metrical composition A group of sensitive and quirky assemblages incorporating alphabetic characters photographs and even pigeons' feet in kimonolike manner of makings are what she calls "vestment as shrines of the investigation of the Self" An interrelated series of plastic arts assemblages and photocollages, "The Image of St Bernadette," analyzes the myth-making proces of the Roman Catholic temple including elaborate "sales kits" for the saint's souvenirs and a rotating dispenser for fastenings of her hair.

Abeles also obsessively transforms her personal history into art. Her fresh work, seen at Turner/Krull, reveals the novel dissolution of her marriage in a series of diverting exhibitionistic assemblages. In Cocktail Shirts she tries upon a scorned wife's revenge, transforming cut-up fragments of her ex's starched white shirts into a prim frock with scorch-mark patterns. The display also included the series of photographs, "Experiment for Myself as Other" (1979) in which she took self-portraits by means of striking at her camera's shutter release with various existences including a push broom, a plumbing pipe and a yardstick. Oblivious to her onslaught, the camera simply takes the picture, recording the crazed facial expressions of her quixotic combat.

Abeles obsessively exhausts her surroundings, turning everything in her studio (and life) into her art. upon one rare clear L.A. day, she noticed from her studio window a previously obscur view of the San Gabriel Mountains. Her throw out Pilgrimage to the Wedge (1986-87) documented a hike at the height of smog season from her studio in downtown L.A. to the mark where she could again diocese the mountains--a trek of 16 1/2 miles. This cast brings home the odd nature of the L.A. landscape, a great deal of of which is invisible for greatest in quantity of the year. Abeles's localized casts speak of more than just the specificities of her surroundings. These novel exhibitions demonstrate that her work be worthy ofs an audience outside of sees Angeles. Indeed, a slew of younger emerging artists, similar as Daniel Martinez and Laura Howe, have been shaped by dint of her quirky amalgamations of personal confession and social concern

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